Your guide for finding the "Good Ass Games"

Month: March 2016

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Like Pop, I’m playing the long con. We only have two weeks left in the regular season, and this coming weekend is the Final Four. I originally had plans to go to Lawrence to celebrate the Jayhawks return to the Final Four (and I still might despite their loss on Saturday), but now I may need to rethink my schedule for the week. Anyway, I’ll need more time to develop a well thought out, end of the regular season post–complete with end of the year awards and a playoff preview.

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Miami vs. Portland

Toronto vs. San Antonio (Good Ass Game of the Week)

Sunday

Minnesota vs Dallas

Oklahoma City vs. Houston

Portland vs. Golden State

Buster of the Week Award:

Mike Krzyzewski was not only out of line for calling out Oregon’s Dillon Brooks in the handshake line, but then he had the gall to get persnickety with a reporter who asked him about the incident. Instead of people talking about the great job the Ducks did on putting the smack down on the Blue Devils, everyone was talking about the “handshake line incident.”

Then after getting all types of criticism, Kryzewski comes out with an apology statement mere hours before the Ducks were facing off against the Sooners, saying he “hopes he didn’t create a distraction for Oregon” to take away from their Friday night win. He didn’t say shit about lying about what he “may or may not” have said to Brooks in line.

But the main reason Coach K gets the BOW award, is that he coached J.J. Redick, a player notorious for throwing up the shocker towards opponents fans after getting baskets. Coach K also currently coaches a player by the name of Grayson Allen, a dude who thinks moving your feet on defense means tripping players when they blow by him.

I love how Kryzewski can talk to other teams’ players about sportsmanship when Duke is known for its dirty players (there is a reason people hate Christian Laettner) FOH with all that crazy talk Coach K. People like Coach K and Joe Paterno kill me with all that fake piety shit.

There better not be a scandal in the next few years, because you know your boy Bmick will harken back to this past weekend and say that I knew he was a snake. Have a good week. Enjoy what is left of the NCAA season.

This week has seen a great deal of basketball–some good and some bad. The way I feel about the NCAA tournament is the same way Steve Nash feels about the World Cup. It isn’t the best brand of play, but it is the most exciting.

That being said, I’d rather take good over exciting any day. I’ve had more “exciting” girlfriends than good ones. Hell, you can have an exciting ride in a beat up Chevette, that doesn’t mean it is a good one.

On Saturday, the “Good Ass Game of the Week” happened to overlap with the Jayhawks second round game against UCONN. I watched the first half, but after that, I kept up just enough to see the Wayne Selden alley oop.

Rarely will I say an NBA game where neither team scores 100 is a “good ass game”, but considering the stakes of Saturday night’s affair, I can say without any irony that it lived up to the hype.

The Spurs didn’t necesarily need to win this weekend, but it certainly eased a lot of Spurs’ fans anxiety concerning the prospect of facing the Dubs in the postseason. A Spurs loss would have ended their 43 game home winning streak, and possibly created a little bit of doubt for the rest of the league as to whether Golden State was capable of being beaten 4 out of 7 games.

The San Antonio win was akin to when Rocky finally struck blood on the Russian Ivan Drago, and he realized that the Russian was not indeed a machine (I went on Youtube to link that scene and quickly saw that it is one of the worst boxing scenes in the history of cinema).

All that being said, this is just 1 game out of 82. There are still two more games for them to play against each other. Yes the Spurs were able to bottle up the high octane offense of Golden State, holding them to only 90 possessions on Saturday (thirteen below their season average), but Golden State was also without two of their best defenders in Andrew Bogut and Andre Iguaodala.

The Warriors also were coming off of a back to back against the Dallas Mavericks, which could possibly account for what seemed to be tired legs for Klay Thompson and Steph Curry. There is just as little to take from this close victory at home in San Antonio as there was for the 30 point loss in Oakland back in January. They don’t hand out the NBA trophy until June for a reason.

This week’s Good Ass Games:

Monday

San Antonio-Charlotte

The #mesohornets will give the Spurs a good run, and then the Spurs will bend the game towards their will. I love these kinds of games.

Milwaukee-Detroit

I think this one falls under the Good Ass Game of the Weak category–something to tap that vein to.

“Tap that Vein” Tuesday

Houston-Oklahoma City

Ugh.

Wednesday

Los Angeles Clippers- Golden State

Never disappoints.

Dallas-Portland

Definitely one of the best NBA games last week. Dirk put in 40 and even Deron Williams put in some work in this overtime affair.

Thursday

Utah-Oklahoma City

Portland-Los Angeles Clippers

Sweet 16: Texas A &M-Oklahoma, Kansas-Maryland, Duke-Oregon

The results of course necessitate that you watch the next round games on Saturday

Friday

Toronto-Houston

Dallas-Golden State

Did Dallas have a hand in the Warriors defeat on Saturday? I’d like to think so. It was a good ass game.

Saturday

San Antonio-Oklahoma City (Good Ass Game of the Week)

This one is on NBATV (WTF?????), so unless you live in the Spurs or Thunder tv market, you will be watching it a bar, on a legal(?) streaming site, or spending time with your people. Then again, you can just watch some NCAA.

Sunday

Houston-Indiana or you can watch the Midwest and East regional finals.

Big Ups of the Week go to the UT Longhorns Men Basketball team for their successful season. The results were not much different this year than last, but you can chart the growth of the team from the beginning of the season to their final game on Friday.

Say what you will about former AD Steve Patterson, but his decision to hire Shaka Smart will go down as the best move he made at UT. Shaka Smart is not only a brilliant head coach, he’s a great teacher and mentor. If you ever have some time on your hands, check out LHN All Access with coach Shaka.

You can tell he really cares about his players becoming better people, and not just winning games for the university. Something I could never understand was how parents could send their children to go play for coaches like Bob Huggins and Bobby Knight. People still to this day confuse yelling with teaching.

You don’t see Shaka showing his players up or demeaning them. When he points out mistakes to be corrected, he uses the mistakes as teaching lessons. If there were ever any doubt about how his players feel about him, just watch the press conference after the loss to Northern Iowa. You can tell his players love playing him.

I said that UT will be in the Final Four within 5 years of hiring Shaka Smart, and I am not budging from that prediction. He is the real deal. Hopefully, he doesn’t leave for UNC before he can prove me right.

91-93 Michigan Wolverines

Head Coach: Steve Fisher

Record: 56-14

Final Fours: 2

Big Ten Titles: 0

National Championships: 0

Starters: F Ray Jackson, F Juwan Howard, C Chris Webber,

G Jimmy King, G Jalen Rose

Key Role Players: G Rob Pelinka C Eric Riley F Michael Talley

With the NCAA tournament only hours away from starting (oh who am I kidding? By the time you read this, it may be the 2nd round), I thought it’d be fitting to give a quick shout out to the Michigan Fab Five. They changed the game of college basketball, taking what the Runnin’ Rebels started and taking it to a whole other level as far as style, flair, and image.

Unlike UNLV, they never won a championship, losing in the title game back to back years. In fact, they never even won a Big Ten title (something Bill Walton used to always bring up back in the day).

Were they overhyped? Perhaps. Were they revolutionary? Absolutely. No team dared to wear baggy shorts, and low cut blacks socks. No team encapsulated the times like they did, coming onto the scene right around the beginning of the ‘golden age of hip hop’.

I was in 7th grade when the Fab Five formed, having no idea that only 30 miles away from my Dallas suburb was an 18 yr-old named Jimmy King, who could jump out of the gym. In fact, I’d never even watched a full college basketball game up until the 1991-92 NCAA tournament. My dad rooted for teams like UNLV, Arkansas and Georgetown, because they had “more brothas” playing for them. The games were always on in the background, but the only sports I liked back then were football and baseball.

That all changed after watching my first Michigan basketball game. These guys were brash, fun, and high flying. Nothing gave me a bigger thrill than watching Chris Webber throw down an alley-oop dunk, and Jimmy King in the open court was an automatic two points. After watching them play the Bob Huggins coached Cincinnati Bearcats (led by Nick Van Exel) in the semi-finals, I spent the rest of the eveing practicing Jalen Rose’s lefty leaner in my buddy’s driveway.

I made some academic mistakes that forced my mother to ground me from television, and I was stuck listening to the championship game against Duke on the radio. The first half of the game went well for Michigan, but Duke dismantled them in the second half of the game. I listened in dissatisfaction while trying to imagine what Webber’s 360 dunk must have looked like on television.

We didn’t have cable at my house. This made every televised Michigan game an event, and I sat in front of the living room tv humming the “Hail to the Victors” fight song during the timeouts. One particular conference game between the Wolverines and Hoosiers was especially memorable because it got interrupted by local coverage of the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco.

I knew nothing about David Koresh, and had never been to Waco, and couldn’t care less at the time about any of it. The game was over by the time they cut back to the action. Indiana fans were cheering and the Wolverines were sulking on the sidelines as time expired.

The Fab Five run through the tournament was not a thing of beauty. They had trouble scoring at times because they weren’t a very good three point shooting team. Rob Pelinka (also known as NBA superagent to players like Kobe Bryant and James Harden) was their biggest outside threat off the bench. You could see how things opened up inside when he was in the game, as teams couldn’t sag off.

Their bench was also pretty young and thin; one that only went 8 deep at best. It goes to show just how good their starting five were because everyone (not named Ray Jackson) played over 1,000 minutes for the season.

I wonder now in hindsight if playing all five freshman (and sophomores) as starters was the best idea. Chemistry aside, I wonder just how more effective the second unit would have been had King and Jackson led the helm.

Back then, small ball wasn’t really a thing outside of teams like FSU (with their 3 guard attack of Bobby Sura, Charlie Ward, and Sam Cassell) and sometimes Duke, but this era of Michigan ball sometimes looked unbalanced.

UCLA and Kentucky took the Wolverines to the limit before bowing out of the tournament, and a part of me wonders if they were spent by the end of that championship game against North Carolina. Mental fatigue can make people do funny things, and maybe that contributed to that ill fated timeout (causing me to lose my first ever sports bet).

There are plenty of games to watch online (courtesy of the NCAA vault), if you feel yourself geting nolstagic for the New Edition of 90’s basketball. They were not the most fundamentally sound of teams, and they rubbed a lot of old white people the wrong way, but they were still a lot of fun to watch.

You can’t look at the career paths of the Freshman Fab Five and say they were losers. Webber and Rose has gone on to have outstanding careers in the media, while Howard is an assistant coach for the Miami Heat. Ray Jackson runs an elite basketball program for Austin youth. Jimmy King is mentoring youth in Detroit.

King and Jackson didn’t do much professionally after Michigan, while Webber, Howard, and Rose played on various entertaining teams in the NBA (Howard of course got a couple of rings with the Heat).

You can bring up the off the court controversies that caused Michigan to vacate the wins, and you can always bring up the fact that Michigan never won any kind of championship. But as Jalen Rose himself says, “there is the scoreboard, and there is the score of the game of life.” I think you can say they all won in that regard–especially Rob Pelinka, that dude is filthy rich.

We are pretty much in the 4th quarter of the NBA regular season. After losing to the LOL Lakers, the Warriors need to go 18-3 to pass the 95-96 Bulls for the best of all time. If any team is going to beat them 4 times in 7 games, they will have to take advantage of them on the offensive boards where they rank 27th in opponents offensive rebounds (OKC outrebounded them by 30 two weekends ago).

They also turn the ball over a lot. With all that being said, it takes a perfect game to even come close to beating the Warriors for one game. Of course, with all championships, teams have to be good and lucky as well. The Dubs are nicked up, let’s see if this plays a factor in how they finish the regular season.

The Spurs are only 2.5 games back of the Dubs with a 53-9 record–and guess what? They have Kevin Martin and Andre Miller added to their bench now. Come playoff time, they will be well rested.

It was a really rough week for the Thunder. Yet for all the doom and gloom coming the way of Oklahoma, the Thunder are 3rd in the west with a 43-20 record. If they finish .500 for the rest of the season, they will still have 50 wins this year. That is not bad at all for a team with 2 superstars and a bunch of scrubs. T

You could say the same thing about the Clippers who have not missed a beat without Beige Blake Griffin. The one glaring *ahem* to the previous statement is that they are only 15-14 against .500 teams and have only 3 wins all year against .600 teams. This just screams pretender to me. But they were suspect even with Blake.

Memphis is trending down despite their 7-3 record over the past 10 games. They just don’t have a way to get easy buckets. Everything is a grind for them. If Mike Conley were playing in the east (and why aren’t they?), he’d be an all-star point guard.

Dallas is just as pesky as ever. I love the addition of David Lee, but they are still a little thin in their frontcourt to make any noise in the playoffs. Mavs (dads) fans should be happy for what many (not me) expected to be a possible lottery season. I think they could take the Thunder to 6 games in the first round if the standings continue to be this way. I’d much rather see them grab that fifth spot and give the world a Clippers/Mavericks first round series.

My boy Knapp is super paranoid about all the love the Trailblazers are getting. The problem they will encounter if they make the playoffs, is that teams will find a way to take away your best options. CJ and Dame won’t be enough to push them into the 2nd round. They’ll need another certified weapon down the road if they wanna go deep into April next season. I think David Lee looks good in Maverick green, but if I’m a Blazer’s fan, I’m not sure I would not thumb my nose up at a 6’7 lefty forward who can get you some easy buckets.

The Rockets are pathetic. I’m going on record now and rooting that Mizzou Quinn can coach the SLC’s into that 8th spot. They at least like basketball. Rockets players just wanna get paid. #cashbeforefame

The Clevelandiers are still a second tier team, but you would be a fool to bet against Lebron in a 7 game series over in the east.

How about that Raptors game on Friday huh? Guess what? I still haven’t watched it yet. We just got internet at my house as of 20 minutes ago. I think the Raptors can give Cleveland a run for their money. Had they one more big man, I’d say they’d have a chance to upend the Cavs for the east title.

The Celtics are standing strong at the third spot. It is an understatement to say they are outpacing their initial expectations. They are one major piece away from being Finals contenders. C’s fans will be happy if they just make the second round this year. Like I said last week, a Hornets-Celtics first round would be a good ass series.

Would anyone outside of Miami and Atlanta be checking for a Heat-Hawks series? This has NBATV written all over it for April.

I would definitely mess with a Raptors-Pacers first round. Pacers are gritty, and I’ll take Frank Vogel, Paul George and Monta Ellis against anyone in the east. Though I have to say, I’m not sure about the Ty Lawson signing. Too many players get into trouble in citiess like Indianapolis and Cincinnati because there is nothing to do except hit the strip clubs and drink. Managment as a precaution, needs to make sure Lawson has Uber on his phone, and never let him drive for the rest of the season.

Will someone please put the Bulls out of their misery? Please? I’m tired of seeing them get beat by Lebron. Let the Pistons have a crack at em. The NBA needs a new narrative. Go to the lottery, trade Derek Rose, and build the team around Jimmy Buckets.

This week will be a slew of good ass games. Conference tournaments for the Power Five, and if I were a betting man, I’d lay money on the Pac-12 being the most entertaining of all the major tourneys. Any combination of Cal, Oregon, Washington, Arizona,and even UCLA will be worth staying up for.

The Big 12 is the runner up for Good Ass Conference Tourney of the year. Kansas has already locked their 12th consecutive regular season title. I wouldn’t be surprised if Bill extends the bench a bit and let some players get loose for the Big Dance. Barring a major collapse they pretty much have a number 1 seed locked up. This is the most realistically confident I have felt about a Jayhawks team in years, which means they’ll get uset by Richmond in the first round. I wouldn’t leave a dollar bill anywhere near a tournament bracket this year. The field this year is more wide open than……….. well you get the picture.